February 22, 2021 Show with Dr. Joe Morecraft on “How to Read the Bible Biblically” (Part 2)

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February 22, 2021 Dr. JOE MORECRAFT, author & pastor of Heritage Presbyterian Church in Cumming, GA, who will address: PART *2* of “HOW to READ the BIBLE BIBLICALLY”

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April 27, 2021 Show with Ernie Springer, Dr. Joel Yeager, & Dr. Daniel O’Roark on “Coronavirus & the Leadership of the Christian Church: A Sacred Trust Broken” (Part 3)

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Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown
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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,
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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
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Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.
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Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.
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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours and we hope to hear from you the listener with your own questions and now here's your host
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Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon
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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.
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This is Chris Arnzen your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio wishing you all a happy Monday on this 22nd day of February 2021.
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I have a prayer request to start off the program today. Please pray for the
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Bagnato family, the surviving members of the family of Joe Bagnato who was a dear friend of mine going all the way back to my infancy in Christianity when
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I was first saved in the 1980s. Joe Bagnato was a deacon at Calvary Baptist Church in Amityville, Long Island, a
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Reformed Baptist Church that later merged with First Baptist Church of Merrick to become
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Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Long Island and Joe had been a deacon there all these years and he and his wife were very close friends of mine, very instrumental parts of my growth in the
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Christian faith being there as friends and just wonderful Christian examples to follow.
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Well, tragically Joe died the day before yesterday,
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Saturday afternoon and I had, in fact
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I'm sorry it was more recently than that, it was yesterday afternoon and I just would like a prayer for that family as they mourn the loss of a wonderful godly man.
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His illness was complicated by the coronavirus and he was put on a respirator and did not last very long after that.
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So please pray for the Bagnato family at this time of deep mourning and grief but they all have the joy of knowing with certainty that Joe is indeed with the
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Lord God Savior and King Jesus Christ whom he served so faithfully and joyfully for so many years and I thank you for your prayers for Joe Bagnato.
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I am so thrilled to have back on the show today to discuss part two of the subject that we began a number of weeks ago.
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I am speaking of Dr. Joseph C. Moorcraft III. Actually we began this conversation with him on February 9th and this is part two of a discussion on a book that is soon to be brought back into print,
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How to Read the Bible Biblically. Dr. Moorcraft is an author and pastor of Heritage Presbyterian Church in Cumming, Georgia and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back again to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr.
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Joseph C. Moorcraft. It's always enjoyable, Chris, to be with you. And let me right away give out our email address for our listeners who may have questions of their own.
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It's chrisarnzen at gmail .com. C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.
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Please give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the
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USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.
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Let's say you have an understanding of a topic we are addressing that is in disagreement with your own pastors.
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Or perhaps you're even a pastor and you disagree with your own elders or denomination over something. Or you're just becoming educated about an issue that is causing you to question former beliefs that are being embraced by your congregation.
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Whatever the case may be that would lend you to desiring to remain anonymous, we will obviously grant you that request.
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But if it's just a general question on church history, on theology, on doctrine, just please, if it's a general question, give us at least your first name, city and state, and country of residence.
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That's chrisarnzen at gmail .com. Well, as we always do,
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Dr. Mark Raff, for the sake of those who are hearing you for the first time especially and do not know anything about Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, why don't you let our listeners know something about that congregation?
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Our church is a small church about four years old, 40 miles north of Atlanta, and we are a member of the
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Reformed Presbyterian Church, Hanover Presbytery. Our people come from every kind of background, from miles away as well as close at home.
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We are devoted to the inerrancy of scripture, to the original Westminster Confession of Faith and larger and shorter catechisms, and to the carrying out of the
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Great Commission. And if anybody wants more information on Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, the website is heritagepresbyterianchurch .com,
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heritagepresbyterianchurch .com. Well, Dr. Mark Raff, we already covered in part one of this discussion on February 9th some primary things involving a discussion on how to read the
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Bible biblically. We addressed how when reading the
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Bible we have to determine what kind of literature this particular section we might be reading is.
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We discussed how to interpret prophecy biblically.
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We addressed the importance of the historical grammatical hermeneutics or hermeneutical approach to interpreting scripture.
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We delved into a bit of what at least at the very beginning may appear to be baffling and bizarre imagery in the
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Book of Revelation and how we are to interpret those things. We addressed the different kinds of literalism that we must have in mind when we read the scripture and that nobody really has a wooden literal interpretation of the entire
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Bible even though they might claim to interpret the Bible in its entirety literally.
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What they mean by that is not necessarily what one might automatically think. If you take that sentence literally, nobody interprets the
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Bible that way. Not even the most hardcore of fundamentalist dispensationalists do.
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If you could, why don't you do a summary of some of the most important things that we already addressed and then we'll move on to new uncharted territory in this discussion.
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Sure. I think last time we talked about the principles of interpretation. This time
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I want us to talk about the presuppositions. A lot of people do not know how to read the
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Bible today. In some ways you read the Bible like you do not read any other book since it alone is the
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Word of God. There are other ways in which you read the Bible like you read any other book.
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That is, like you just said, you take into consideration what kind of literary genre you're studying.
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Is it historical narrative, poetry, parable, prophecy, law, what? Then you interpret it accordingly.
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When we finished, I was talking about one of the greatest gifts of the 16th century
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Protestant Reformation to the church. That is, how to read the Bible.
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John Calvin and the other Reformers gave us the principle of interpretation called the grammatical -historical hermeneutic.
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Hermeneutic simply means principles of biblical interpretation. For a thousand years almost prior to the
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Reformation, most of the medieval church had an allegorical interpretation of the
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Bible where they were always finding hidden meanings, symbolisms, secret meanings that only the priest and the church knew and the average person could not read the
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Bible for himself because these symbols and hidden meanings were so fantastic that the average
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Bible reader would never come up with these things just reading the
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Bible for himself. And so we were talking about the grammatical part of the grammatical -historical hermeneutic.
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That is, if we have an English Bible and we're American and we don't know an
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English grammar, we will not know how to read the Bible. We've got to know what verbs are, subject, predicate, adverbs, adjectives, past, present, future, pronouns, antecedent, pronoun.
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All of those are extremely important. So one of the most important things your hearers can do is go back and review
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English grammar, at least on the basic elements. The other side of that principle of hermeneutic, grammatical -historical, we didn't get to.
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And that is that when we consider a passage of Scripture, we must always take into consideration its context.
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And that is what's going on at the time. Here you have in Romans 8, say, you have
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Jesus saying, I'm the light of the world. Who is he speaking to?
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You bring it up at that particular point in his battle with the
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Pharisees and the scribes, etc. That makes all the difference.
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When Jesus said, I'm the bread of life, what did he just do? He just fed the 5 ,000 with a few loaves and fishes.
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And the whole point of that great miracle was to tell them that he is the bread of life, that if you eat of that bread, you'll never hunger and thirst again.
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And when you see in the 8th chapter, where Jesus says,
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I'm the light of the world, it's against the backdrop of the feast of booze or tabernacles that took place in Jerusalem.
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And one of the rites that they had in that feast was to light massive candelabras and to people to carry torches around to commemorate the time that they lived in the wilderness in temporary housing.
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And they built booths now during this feast. And they're celebrating the fact that God provided manna for them.
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God provided water. God led them by the pillar of fire. And so Jesus is saying, forget the candelabras.
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Forget the torches. The temple's dead. It's turned for me.
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I'm the Lord of the temple. It's my house. And I'm telling you, I am the light of the world now.
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Previous to that, another ritual they did in the feast of the tabernacles is they had a golden pitcher.
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And they filled it with water and they poured it around the base of the altar, symbolizing the water that came from the rock that God provided for them in the wilderness.
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And Jesus in that very context said, forget the golden pitcher with the water.
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I am the water of life. And so in the 6th, 7th, 8th chapter, 6th chapter, he says,
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God fed you with manna in the wilderness. Praise the Lord for that. But I am the bread of life now.
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So knowing the situation into which things are spoken is extremely important, not only to understanding, but enriching the text.
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And to put it more simply, when you read a verse, always see what the verses before it and the verses after it, how they can help you understand that verse.
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In fact, just like a realtor, any good realtor knows that the value of a home and property are determined by location, location, location.
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That's a common phrase that people being trained in the realty field and also those who are buying or selling a house are educated about.
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Location, location, location determines the value. And that's how we determine what a scripture is actually saying.
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And you might even rephrase that context, context, context. That's exactly right.
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A text without a context is a pretext. That's an old saying. And so you get a verse, you see what's the historical situation, who's speaking, who's being spoken to, what's being spoken about.
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You look at the paragraph before, the paragraph afterwards to see if they can help you understand the verse that you're studying.
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A lot of occults take text out of their context and try to make them say things they don't really say.
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One obvious old example of how you can take a text out of its context and prove that the
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Bible teaches that there is no God. There is a verse in the book of Psalms, quote, there is no
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God. Now if you take that out of its context, you've got a big problem. But when you look at what it says in the rest of that verse, before and after it says, the fool says in his heart, there is no
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God. One of the most practical things that has happened is for the
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Bible to be put in verses and chapters. That has been a great help. When the Bible was originally written in Hebrew and Greek, it did not have any chapters or verses.
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There's many times there weren't spaces between the words. But somebody put them into chapter and verses to help us find where such and such a thing is easier.
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It makes it easy. The problem is, here's the weakness of chapters and verses.
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When people read the Bible and they don't know what they're doing, they think the Bible is simply a collection of verses.
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So people say, well here's my verse for today. Or here's my favorite verse. As if it's just a collection of verses.
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Take and pick your verses. But it's not a collection of verses. It's written in paragraphs.
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It's written in books. And when I study the Bible, when I preach, I try to read in terms and preach in terms of paragraphs.
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You know, a paragraph is a paragraph because it contains one central thought.
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And so when you go to the Bible, you look for various markings that identify where paragraphs begin.
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And then you study that paragraph and see what that paragraph, the central point of that paragraph is, and how that paragraph is making the point.
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And so there's always the context. A variety of contexts. For instance, when you study a verse, the first thing you've got to realize is it's in the context of the
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Bible. And therefore, every word in that verse is the word of the living
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God. Another context you have to ask is, is it the Old Testament or the
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New Testament? That makes a lot of difference. You ask yourself, this is in the book of Luke, so I've got to study this verse in terms of what
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Luke's purpose was for writing his book. And so on.
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I mean, Bible study is not something you just take a pill and all of a sudden you can do easy as it can be.
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It takes effort. It takes work. It takes concentration. It takes thought. It takes knowledge.
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It takes discipline. And so the grammatical or historical hermeneutic simply says when you study the grammar in a text and you study the biblical meaning of the words in the text all the way up.
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Make sure that you define words biblically and not just according to Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.
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You understand the meaning of the words biblically. You understand the grammatical relationship. You understand the context of that particular passage.
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And then with dependence upon the Holy Spirit to enlighten your heart, you can come to a correct understanding of the passage of Scripture that you're studying.
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And we already have a listener who has a question.
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We have CJ in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, who asks,
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I have heard different people say that we who are believers in sola scriptura, that the
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Scriptures are our sole infallible and inerrant authority over the Church, are inconsistent because we believe things like the historical grammatical approach to Scripture and sola scriptura itself, which are concepts not clearly spelled out in the
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Bible. How do you respond to people that make such accusations? Well, I would say they are.
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The people who say that those aren't biblical, they're very shrewd when they make that point.
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The Roman Catholic Church is making the point more and more that the Bible itself does not teach sola scriptura.
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That is their main argument. They think that is our primary Achilles' heel.
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Oh, I know it. I'll just give you one verse. In Corinthians, right off the bat,
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I can't remember whether it's 1 or 2, it's chapter 4. And it says, Paul's talking, and he says,
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Do not go beyond what is written. Now, that was the last word of the debate that Greg Bonson had with Jerry Manatex when they were debating over sola scriptura.
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That was the last word of the debate. Oh, I know, I heard that. That's exactly right. So, you can defend the idea that the
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Bible is the inerrant, sole divine authority for the
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Christian, and that the Word of God is confined to Scripture and does not include all tradition, or the decrees of the
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Pope. You can find that in Timothy. I mean, it's not difficult to present an exegetical, expository, biblical defense of sola scriptura.
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Nor is it difficult to present a biblical defense of the grammatical, historical, hermeneutic.
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What you do is you see how the authors of the Bible interpreted
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Scripture. How did Paul interpret the
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Old Testament? How did Paul interpret the Word of Jesus?
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So, you look at the apostles, for example, and you see how they read
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Scripture, and how they interpreted Scripture, and you'll find that the method that they used is exactly the method we've talked about, the grammatical, historical, hermeneutic.
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So, both of those principles can be, without difficulty, defended.
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I have written a major paper on the biblical basis for sola scriptura, and I know a young man that has written the best book ever written on the grammatical, historical, hermeneutic, and the information's out there.
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So, don't let these people throw you off balance when they say, you're using non -biblical methods to interpret the
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Bible. We say, no, here's the reason I believe in sola scriptura, here's the reason
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I believe in the grammatical, historical, hermeneutic. Now, understand that when we say sola scriptura, we're not saying that a
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Christian does not have to read anything else. That a
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Christian, if he's humble, is going to be dependent solely upon the
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Bible as the Word of God, the 66 books of the Protestant Bible as the Word of God.
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But he's going to want to know, what has the Holy Spirit taught the Church throughout its history?
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And so he looks at some commentaries or sermons of the great God -owned preachers or commentarians throughout history.
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For input, he's humble enough not to depend entirely upon himself. Whenever I prepare a sermon for a text,
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I always study as many sermons and commentaries on that text that I can study all the way back to the early
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Church. And the way that we should counter -argue or defend that practice as not being in contradiction to sola scriptura is that the
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Bible clearly teaches that teachers are required in the
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Church and that not everybody even was qualified to be a teacher. So therefore, there is nothing inconsistent with gathering to yourself teachers that are living and dead and comparing them with each other, and most of all, as a
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Berean, comparing what they have to say to what the Scripture teaches. And that's the key, is that we don't use only the
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Bible to understand the Bible, but we have to judge what teachers are saying according to the
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Bible. Exactly correct. That if we think that we don't need any help as individualists, we don't need any help, we just can come to our conclusions without any assistance from the
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Church, we're going to wind up with false doctrine. That the Holy Spirit was promised by Jesus to lead the
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Church into all truth. So in understanding the Scriptures, we've got to be humble enough to allow ourselves to say,
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I can't do this by myself. The Bible is the Word of God. Let's see how other great Christians in the past have interpreted it so that I can have some help in understanding this text.
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And also I would add to that, that whereas you don't have to know
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Hebrew and Greek to understand the Bible, you should have a preacher that knows
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Hebrew and Greek, that more and more seminaries are no longer requiring
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Hebrew and Greek. Old Testament written in Hebrew, New Testament in Greek. And the reason more of them are not teaching those anymore, requiring them, is because they don't believe in inerrancy, and so it really doesn't matter.
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But the point is, you need a preacher who knows Hebrew and Greek. Amen. And the comparison of the two views have often been described as the difference between sola scriptura, which is a correct view of Scripture, that the
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Scriptures are indeed, as the listener said, the sole infallible and inerrant authority over the
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Church. But what is wrong is sola scriptura, thinking so highly of ourselves, that all we need is our own mind, the
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Bible, and a quiet place to read it. Well, that goes with the denigration of the
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Church. We have a world now where many people profess to be
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Christians, say they don't want anything to do with organized church. All I need is my family and my
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Bible and my gun, and that's it. A KJV and an
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AK -47. That's exactly correct. We have to go to our first break right now, and by the way, when we come back,
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I'd like you to let our listeners know what that best book that you've seen in print in regard to the historical grammatical interpretation,
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I believe you said it was about, that a young author wrote it. But anyway, if anybody wants to join us, our email address again is chrisarnson at gmail .com,
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chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the
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USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal or private matter. We'll be right back with Dr. Joe Moorcraft.
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And we are now back with our guest today, Dr. Joseph C. Moorcraft III. This is part two of a discussion we began on February 9th.
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This is part two of the discussion How to Read the Bible Biblically. And if you have a question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.
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chrisarnson at gmail .com. And I think I forgot to tell C .J. from Lindenhurst, Long Island, our first questioner of the day, that he has won a free copy of this book.
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You do have to be patient because it is not back in print yet, but should be within a month or two. But we have been promised by Tim Renshaw that this book will be sent to you as soon as they have it in print.
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Tell us about this publisher and this ministry who has brought this book of yours back into print,
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Dr. Moorcraft. Tim Renshaw is an elder in my church. He's made a good living, had a good career through his life.
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But for the past year or so, he's laid aside all of his employment and is spending all of his time scanning and editing and publishing box after box after box of unpublished manuscripts
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I have. And if you go to comprehensivechristianity .com,
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you will find several books, Kindle, e -books, paperback books, on everything from 600 -page commentary on the book of Genesis to smaller booklets on liberation theology.
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But it's worth going there, and Tim has done a great and sacrificial job.
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That's comprehensivechristianity .com, and hopefully we'll remember to announce that again later.
37:41
We do have another listener. We have Susan Margaret in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, who says, the verses that you were discussing before that teach
37:55
Sola Scriptura, in your opinion, were written during a day when the canon was not even closed yet.
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How do we use these scriptures as defenses for Sola Scriptura?
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Well, that's a very important and very big question that will require more time than we have here.
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But it's simply this. The Bible, the New Testament, also teaches that the canon is going to be concluded and complete, and I'm not going to have the time, of course, to defend all this exegetically.
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But 1 Corinthians 13 tells us that when this process that has given us biblical revelation is completed with the 66 books of the
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Bible, all the former ways by which God revealed Himself to man will come to an end.
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Now, that's going to cause more questions than answers, but nevertheless, the
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Bible does teach itself that there will be a conclusion of the canon resulting in the 66 books of the
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Scripture. So all of these things fit together. Paul tells us how to interpret the
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Scriptures. Paul tells us that the Scriptures, the
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Word of God is the Bible and Christ, and not the Word of the Church or oral tradition in Timothy and Corinthians.
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And then Paul also tells us that there's going to be a completion of this process that has given us biblical revelation.
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All of those are taught in the Bible. And, of course, the 66 books, that number is not taught in the
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Bible. That just happened to be providentially what came about in the...
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Well, what's interesting is that Jesus' Old Testament is exactly the same
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Old Testament that Protestants have. Not the Old Testament of the Roman Catholic Church, which has more books and more chapters than some of the books, but it's a historical fact.
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I mean, anybody, you can't argue against it that the Hebrew text that Jesus had was the same...
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what we have today. And then you have the Apostles quoting each other as Scripture.
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So you have Scripture cannot be broken, said by Jesus, and he's talking about the Old Testament. Then you have the
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Apostles quoting each other's books as Scriptures. Like, for instance,
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Peter says people twist and distort the letters of Paul as they do the rest of the
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Scriptures. So there is this body of revelation that Jesus says we're to defend the faith once delivered to the saints, the faith, that body of truth revealed in prophetic and apostolic writings that will be completed and was completed with the...
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You remember how the book of Revelation ends. In Deuteronomy 4 it says, and this is paraphrase, it says don't add to or take away from the word of God.
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That's the fifth book of the Bible. There's a bunch of books to come. Did all the books that follow the book of Deuteronomy add to the word of God?
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No, they were part of the word of God. But then in the last chapter of the book of Revelation you have this statement that says in so many words, anybody that adds to these words, plural, in other words, it's cursed.
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In other words, it's like saying 10 -4 over and out. That the revelation of God is complete.
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And don't expect any more words from God until Jesus comes at the end of time.
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And by the way, folks, if you want to see an excellent debate that my friend Dr. James R.
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White of Alpha Omega Ministries had with a Roman Catholic apologist by the name of Gary Machuta on the
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Apocrypha, known by the Roman Catholics as the Deuterocanonical books, look that up at aomin .org
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and you will find that debate and perhaps you can even find it on YouTube.
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If you look up James White and Gary Machuta and I think his last name is
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M -I -C -H -U -T -A but I could be wrong. If you look up James White debate on Apocrypha, it will come up.
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But the reason why I mention that is that when you said that the
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Old Testament that Jesus used was the same canon that the
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Protestants use, the Roman Catholic apologist will say that Jesus quoted from the
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Septuagint and every ancient copy of the Septuagint, which is the
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Greek Old Testament, contains the Apocrypha. And I have heard that explained by people like Dr.
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White is that we don't have a first century copy of the
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Septuagint. We have copies from later that were developed where the
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Apocrypha could have easily been added to that Greek translation.
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But do you have any other way of... Well, I'm sure James White would be great on this subject.
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I would say that the Apocrypha, that is the books written between the Old Testament and the New Testament, that the
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Apocrypha does not claim to be the Word of God, that the Apocrypha has theological and ethical and historical mistakes in it that are obvious, and that the one inspired
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Old Testament is not anyway the Septuagint. The one that's inspired of God is the
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Hebrew Old Testament. And going back to the concept of something that you hinted at before,
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I know that this is a key part of your entire interpretation of Scripture, and it is very important in regard to the lenses through which we view
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Scripture, and that is something known as presuppositionalism. And if you could please explain that. Yes, sir.
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If I can say one other thing first. Sure. And that is that Bible study, you have to have an accurate
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English translation of the Bible, which means you've got... There are all kinds of translations and paraphrases out there.
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You've got to make sure that you have one that's closest as possible to the original
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Greek and Hebrew text. And you've got to know the difference between a paraphrase and translation.
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A paraphrase is where the person doing the paraphrasing is telling you what he thinks the original authors meant by what they said.
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Well, I may disagree with somebody on what he thinks they meant. I want to know what they wrote.
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I want to know what they said. And so in an accurate translation, the translator puts into English as closely as possible exactly what the original prophets and apostles wrote down on a piece of paper.
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And I'm so glad that you are one of the promoters of a publisher that keeps this program on the air, and that is the publishers of the
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New American Standard Bible. Yes. I was going to get to that next. I think
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I heard on your program a while ago that somebody said that his preferred text was the New American Standard Version.
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And let me just very quickly give another plug for that. I think the most accurate
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English translation in history is the American Standard Version of 1901.
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It is great for close, careful study of the Bible. But it's not good for reading in church because it is so accurate and so in accordance with the original that the
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Greek and the Hebrew, unlike English, they didn't always put the subject first and then the verb and then predicate.
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They would put at the front of the sentence whatever they think was the most important thing in the sentence. Maybe the subject, maybe an adverb.
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You may not get to the subject until the end of the sentence. And so as a result, it's very difficult to follow when reading publicly.
47:05
It's great for close study. So the New American Standard Version is an attempt to keep the accuracy of the
47:16
American Standard Version but to make it more readable.
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To make it more readable without sacrificing the accuracy of the
47:29
American Standard Version of 1901. And by the way, folks, this was not planned, but I might as well take advantage of this since the publishers...
47:39
I'm not downplaying the King James. The King James is an accurate translation. I just can't stand calling a
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Bible the King James Version when King James was a tyrant and a homosexual.
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Yes, there are even some King James only as to prefer to call it the authorized version. Yeah, well, I don't think the
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King or the Anglican Church authorized the Bible either. But anyway... Especially Baptists should not view it that way.
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Predominantly, the King James onlyists are Baptists. Now, you know what's funny to me is that you have these fundamentalists who are
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King James only people. And the King James was written in this high
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Elizabethan English. Not because everybody spoke that way, but to make it fit in with Anglo -Catholic liturgy.
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So it's always been interesting to me that fundamentalists who are against Catholic liturgy are defending only a translation that was written in order to be friendly with that type of liturgy.
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But the King James is... It is accurate. Not because of King James, but in spite of King James.
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The only Greek scholars King James could get were the Puritans. And so that's why the
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King James is accurate. But I think the American Standard Version and particularly the New American Standard Version are more accurate.
49:14
I think you ought to have both. There are other versions going under translations that are popular today, and that is the
49:24
New International Version. The New International Version is a mixture of translation and paraphrase.
49:33
And the reason that it has probably sold more than the New American Standard Version is that the
49:40
International Version has a better marketing program. But it's not a reliable book.
49:48
I don't recommend the New International Version. The worst paraphrase out there is called the
49:57
Living Bible. I have an Indian friend who refers to it as That Broken Bible.
50:07
So when you study the Bible, you've got to make sure you've got an accurate translation.
50:12
The New American Standard is one that you should use. I read that from the pulpit.
50:20
I study on that one. And I also use the American Standard Version. And the King James Version is accurate, too.
50:27
But you need more than one translation of the Bible. And you've got to be able to distinguish translations from paraphrases.
50:35
Now, when we left the last time, I told you about the best book on this subject of grammatical historical hermeneutics.
50:44
I hate to tell you that the best book ever written on the grammatical historical hermeneutics has not been published.
50:53
It's a paper written by a young man. It's magnificent. So if your audience out there wants to, tell them to contact
51:05
Samuel Johnson in Tazewell, Virginia, and tell him that they heard me on an international radio station publish that book.
51:18
I've been trying to get him to publish that book for years and years. I have a paper on sola scriptura answering the question that this be defended biblically.
51:31
If anybody would like that paper, they can contact me through Heritage Presbyterian Church website, and I'll be glad to send them that paper.
51:40
Well, we have to go to our midway break right now. And if anybody would like to join us, send in an email to As always, give us your first name, your city and state and country of residence if you live outside the
51:55
USA, and only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Please be patient with us because this is a longer than normal break because Grace Life Radio 90 .1
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While we simultaneously use this break to air our globally heard commercials. So please use this time to write down as much of the information as you can provided by our advertisers so that you can more successfully and more frequently patronize them which will hopefully make them remain our advertisers because they're pleased with the results.
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So write down that information and also send us a question to chrisarnson at gmail dot com. Don't go away.
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We'll be right back after these messages. Music When Iron Sharpens Iron Radio first launched in 2005, the publishers of the
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Dr. Latane C. Scott, a dear friend of mine going back to the 1990s, and Dr.
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Beth Robinson returning to this program, this time to address a new book that they have written together,
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Talking with Teens About Sexuality. That's tomorrow on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, February 23rd, 4 -6 p .m.
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Eastern Time. Make sure you tune in, and we're also going to be giving away free copies, a limited number of free copies of the book to listeners who send in questions.
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The day after that, we have another returning guest, Fred Butler, who is going to be addressing a part two of a discussion that we began a number of weeks ago on his book
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Royal Deceptions, Exposing the King James Only Conspiracies Against God's Word.
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And my guest today, Dr. Joe Moorcraft, you really enjoyed part one of that interview, didn't you?
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Yes sir, I did. Yeah, and Joe was asking me when Fred was coming back. Well, he will be back
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Wednesday, the 24th of February, for part two of a discussion on that same book,
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Royal Deceptions, Exposing the King James Only Conspiracies Against God's Word.
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If you prefer snail mail, you can send in a question, or should I say, send in a check made payable to Ian Trupp Enzyme Radio to the address, the physical address that will appear on your screen when you click support at www .IanTruppEnzymeRadio
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01:13:09
and put advertising in the subject line. I want to thank Anchored in Truth Ministries, a
01:13:15
Reformed Baptist ministry in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, for being a new advertiser whose ads you have not yet heard.
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I also want to thank A .M. Brewster, a Christian counselor whose ads just recently began airing, and I look forward to hearing from many more of you who want to advertise on this program because you think it is valuable enough to use your hard -earned money to keep it on the air.
01:13:44
Also, folks, please remember I don't want people siphoning money away from the regular giving that they're accustomed to to their own local church where they are a member in order to give to IANTRUPPENZYME RADIO.
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In other words, don't punish your church financially by blessing us financially.
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Those two things are commands of God and Scripture, providing for your church and providing for your family. Providing for IANTRUPPENZYME RADIO is obviously not a command of Scripture, but if you love this show and you are blessed financially above and beyond your ability to support your church and your family, then please go to IANTRUPPENZYMERADIO .COM,
01:14:35
click support, then click, click to donate now, and donate frequently and generously. I want to thank all of you who have been doing that, some of you going all the way back to when we first launched this show in 2005, some of you who are new supporters financially.
01:14:50
I want to thank all of you from the depths of my heart for being so generous and so encouraging to me, reminding me that this show is indeed worth keeping on the air.
01:15:02
Also, folks, if you are not a member of a local Bible -believing church, I may be able to help you find a church no matter where on the planet
01:15:10
Earth you live. I've already helped people all over the world find churches, sometimes within just a few minutes' drive from their own houses, that they didn't even know existed or they didn't know that these churches were biblically sound.
01:15:22
So no matter where you live on the globe, send me an email to chrisarmson at gmail .com and put
01:15:28
I NEED A CHURCH in the subject line. I have lists, extensive lists of biblically faithful churches spanning the globe, and I may be able to help you find a church too.
01:15:36
That's chrisarmson at gmail .com, put I NEED A CHURCH in the subject line. That's also the email address to send in a question to Dr.
01:15:43
Joseph C. Moorcraft III. On our discussion today, this is Part 2 of a discussion we began several weeks ago,
01:15:51
Reading the Bible Biblically, and that email address is chrisarmson at gmail .com,
01:15:59
chrisarmson at gmail .com. Let's get more involved into the details of, since you believe this is such an important aspect of reading the
01:16:10
Bible biblically, tell us more about why presuppositionalism is so important.
01:16:16
When anybody approaches the Bible, he's going to come to the
01:16:22
Bible with certain assumptions, certain pre -understanding, presuppositions.
01:16:28
Nobody comes to the Bible with a blank mind. We all make assumptions about various things, and if our assumptions are not drawn from the
01:16:40
Bible itself, when we approach the Bible, we're not going to understand the
01:16:45
Bible. For instance, if somebody assumes the Bible is simply a history of the evolution of how
01:16:56
Israel has understood God, from a primitive polytheism to a complex polytheism to a complex monotheism to a pure monotheism, if they understand the scriptures to simply be a history of the evolution of the thought of God, they will not understand it, and besides that it will have no authority.
01:17:23
It is simply man expressing you his opinion on how things developed. So it all depends on how you approach the
01:17:32
Bible and the basic assumptions you make about the Bible as to whether or not you're going to understand it.
01:17:39
To understand the scriptures, you must presuppose and assume that it is the verbal plenary revelation of God.
01:17:50
Verbal plenary revelation of God. That is, that the
01:17:57
Holy Spirit so guided the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of the
01:18:03
New Testament that what they wrote down was the word of God, nothing more, nothing less.
01:18:12
And that revelation from God comes verbally. That is, it comes in sentences, words and sentences that are meaningful to us and meaningful to God.
01:18:28
And that this revelation, this verbal revelation is plenary. That is, it comes that every single book of the 66 books of the
01:18:39
Prophets of the Bible are inspired by God, not just the thought content, not just the information that they deliver, but the very words itself.
01:18:50
For instance, I went to a liberal seminary and that liberal seminary did not believe in verbal inspiration.
01:19:00
It didn't believe in inerrancy. And some of the professors would say, well,
01:19:05
I believe that the infallible word of God is written in the fallible words of men.
01:19:11
Well, what in the world does that mean? I mean, I as a man cannot get past the words.
01:19:17
And in modern theology, there is this tendency to separate the revelation of God from the
01:19:26
Bible. My son had a Bible professor who came to class one day in college, put the
01:19:36
Bible on the floor and started jumping up and down on the Bible. Somebody in the class rebuked him and said, how dare you jump up and down on the word of God?
01:19:46
And he said, I would never jump up and down on the word of God. But he was jumping up and down on the
01:19:53
Bible. The Bible is simply a witness to the word of God. So there is this tendency in modern theology today to separate the
01:20:02
Bible from the word of God in some way or another and to say that the Bible is not the revelation of God.
01:20:10
The revelation of God that hits you like a lightning bolt. It doesn't have any content to it.
01:20:16
You just know you've been hit. And that the writers of the scriptures are trying to put into writing what being hit by that lightning bolt means to them.
01:20:25
That means the Bible has no authority whatsoever. So Paul says this astounding statement.
01:20:32
And every time I read it, I'm amazed at it. It's the paraphrase in 1 Corinthians 2.
01:20:38
He says that we as apostles are given information straight from the mind of God.
01:20:47
Spirit produced thoughts and spirit produced words.
01:20:55
Now what that means is that the very thoughts that are expressed in scripture come from the mind of God himself.
01:21:07
And the words that the apostles and prophets used to express those thoughts also originated with God.
01:21:17
So the Bible is not only the word of God, it is the words of God.
01:21:23
And that means we as Christians are going to take every word seriously. Paul says all scripture is inspired by God.
01:21:33
All scripture is God breathed. That is, it's not man breathed.
01:21:39
It's not apostle breathed. It's not prophet breathed. It does not originate with man at all.
01:21:45
It originates with God. All scripture, everything that goes under the name scripture is
01:21:52
God breathed. What is scripture? The Old Testament and the apostolic writings of the
01:21:58
New Testament. And so when we come to studying the scriptures, we assume that none of it is the mere opinion of men.
01:22:09
Now God did use men. And so you have difference in writing ability, writing styles, different languages.
01:22:21
But God knew how to use these men without making them automatons or puppets.
01:22:27
God knew how to use these men with their different personalities, their different backgrounds, to write down exactly what
01:22:35
God wanted us to know, nothing more, nothing less. Now, unless we presuppose that, we're not going to understand scripture.
01:22:44
We're going to assume that some parts of scripture are true and some parts are false. Like for instance, when
01:22:49
Paul talks about the relationship of man and woman and the relation in marriage, particularly where the husband is the head, what we're told today, well, that was just Paul's first century opinion, but it wasn't the word of God.
01:23:04
As you hear, Christians can't say that. Because the Bible is spirit -produced thoughts and spirit -produced words.
01:23:11
And when Paul says that women should not be preachers and lead in worship services, they would say, well, that's just Paul's first century
01:23:19
Jewish opinion. We as Christians cannot say that because every word in the
01:23:28
Bible is from God and expresses thoughts that originate with God.
01:23:33
And the meaning of scripture is scripture. That's why when we study scripture and we want to know what
01:23:41
God's telling us, we not only look for expressed verses, black and white, chapter, verse, we also say what's those verses?
01:23:53
What's the logical deduction we can draw from A and B?
01:23:59
So that the meaning of scripture is scripture. And we see that in Paul, we're not imposing upon scripture a way of interpreting the scripture that is extra scriptural.
01:24:12
Whenever Paul says, most of the time, whenever Paul is expounding the Bible and he says, so that, he's always telling you, here's the implication.
01:24:24
Here's the meaning of what I just told you. So reading the scriptures biblically means approaching them as they are the very word of God.
01:24:37
So that when we read them, we're hearing God himself speak to us.
01:24:43
We hear in a lot of churches today, particularly charismatic and Pentecostal churches, but more unfortunately, we hear people say, what is
01:24:50
God saying to the 21st century church? Well, I know what
01:24:56
God is saying to the 21st century church. And that is the words of Holy Scripture.
01:25:02
What he said in the first century church, he's saying to us today, and God has no more words to add to his word until he comes again in clouds of glory, whether that's tomorrow or whether that's a million years from now, that's how rich and powerful and great the word of God is.
01:25:22
That we don't need anything else. I read for the U .S. Congress many years ago, and I would have my charismatic brothers come to me and, and to make prophecies that I was going to win.
01:25:36
And then after I lost, I never saw them again. And they would say to me, they would say,
01:25:45
Pastor Moorcraft, I have a word from God for you. And I'd say, no, thank you.
01:25:52
I don't want to hear it. Everything I know to be fully equipped as a man of God and to every good work
01:26:01
I have in the God -breathed books of Holy Scripture. Amen. By the way, folks, after the show is over, you might want to look up in the irontrepanzionradio .com
01:26:11
archives, a two -part discussion that I recently had with Justin Peters of Justin Peters Ministries and Andrew Rapoport of Striving for Eternity Ministries, where we aired clips, many clips of false prophets from the word of faith movement, who were absolutely positively certain that Donald Trump was going to win the presidency in a consecutive four -year term, not, not in four years from now.
01:26:46
And how they obviously all were proven to be false because that didn't happen.
01:26:52
But you might find that interesting to, to listen to those two programs.
01:26:58
We have an anonymous listener who says, Dr. Moorcraft, some of my closest friends are
01:27:05
King James Only advocates. Some of what you are saying seems like it falls into line with exactly what
01:27:13
King James Onlyists believe, especially those from the peculiar sect amongst them that believes that the
01:27:22
Bible was actually re -inspired in 1611, and that God actually used those
01:27:28
Anglican translators in a supernatural and perfect way to give us a perfect translation.
01:27:36
I don't believe that's what you are saying at all, since you are not a King James Onlyist, but how can you say that we have every word that is definitely from God's own breath in modern translations if these translators themselves were not divinely inspired?
01:27:55
Well, I would say this, that when the Bible talks about being inspired by the
01:28:01
Holy Spirit, it's talking about the original Hebrew and Greek. That when
01:28:08
Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, Samuel, Isaiah, it, the claim the
01:28:15
Bible makes is what they actually wrote that was inspired of God, not copies, not translations.
01:28:23
In the New Testament, the claim for inerrancy and for plenary verbal inspiration is for the original writings of the apostles.
01:28:37
Now, we don't have any of the original writings of the prophets or the apostles.
01:28:43
They're gone. We don't even have copies of them. We have copies of copies, but we have thousands and thousands of Greek manuscripts, and although we don't have the anymore, the codices, an original is called a codex,
01:29:05
C -O -D -E -X, plural is codices. Even though we don't have the codex, we have the text.
01:29:12
We know what was written by the apostles. When people study these thousands of manuscripts, it becomes obvious what the text was when it was originally written, even though we don't have the originals.
01:29:30
So that when I hold up in my hand, and I preached on this last Sunday, when I hold up in my hand an accurate
01:29:37
English translation of the Bible, I can say without hesitation,
01:29:45
I'm holding in my hand the very word of God without any substantial loss over thousands of years, and so there is no translation that is inspired.
01:30:04
It's the originals that are inspired, and I actually was studying this this week.
01:30:10
We have some King James only people who say that if there is a difference between the
01:30:17
Greek text and the King James, that you must go with the
01:30:24
King James English version over the Greek text. That's right. That's what Peter Ruckman taught, and now his disciples.
01:30:31
Yeah, Ruckman, I read him. I mean, that is absolutely pathetic. Where do you get that in the Bible? Where in the
01:30:38
Bible does it say that any translation, whether it's English, or Portuguese, or German, where do you have in the
01:30:46
Bible anywhere that says there's a translation is inspired of God? Nowhere. It just says the originals are inspired by God, and that's why we have all these thousands of manuscripts, and the ones that are under the
01:31:05
Greek manuscripts that are basis of the new American Standard Version are much older, hundreds of years older, and much more reliable than the
01:31:20
Greek manuscripts they had underlying the King James in 1611. And isn't your belief, and the belief of the vast majority of Reformed scholars, and even those outside of the
01:31:35
Reformed faith, but the vast majority of biblical scholars, believe the best way to defend the inerrancy of scriptures is by sheer virtue of the fact that we can consult many different translations.
01:31:54
And that's the way we can be further assured that when we do a comparative
01:32:01
Bible study, that we are hearing and reading the very words of God that were originally intended.
01:32:09
Yes, sir. I'll give you an example, and it's controversial, but nevertheless, who wants to be controversial?
01:32:17
There is a text in the King James Version that is not in any sermon in the
01:32:27
Greek church for 900 years after it was written. So for 900 years, nobody ever heard this story or heard a sermon on this text.
01:32:38
Book of Plague Caught in Adultery? Yes, sir. I preached on that Sunday. Wow. And Chrysostom, the golden -throated preacher in the early church was magnificent, and he wrote a long commentary on the
01:32:55
Gospel of John. So every Sunday, I'm going through John, so every Sunday I try to read
01:33:01
Chrysostom, and Augustine, and Calvin, and all these other people. And so I went to Chrysostom, and that section is blank.
01:33:14
So the point is, there have been many Greek manuscripts that have been discovered since 1611 that are much older and more reliable than some of the manuscripts that the
01:33:31
Roman Catholic priest, Erasmus, used to create the Textus Receptus.
01:33:39
There were some times in which Erasmus did not have a Greek text, and so there'd be a gap in his manuscripts.
01:33:50
So what he would do would go to the Roman Catholic Latin Vulgate and take the passage for which he had no
01:34:00
Greek manuscripts out of the Latin Vulgate and translate it back into Greek.
01:34:10
Now that's shoddy scholarship. So I praise the
01:34:15
Lord that through history, God has enabled the church to find more and more manuscripts that are old, ancient, reliable.
01:34:28
And you have people working in that whole study of the text of Scripture who want to get us back to the purest
01:34:38
Greek and Hebrew we could possibly get to. To Greek and Hebrew manuscripts that are as close as possible to the original
01:34:50
Greek and Hebrew. And that's basically the reason I prefer the
01:34:55
New American Santa Virgin. Even though the King James is accurate, the
01:35:01
New American Santa Virgin has gone back to more ancient, reliable Greek manuscripts so that we have in our hand an even more reliable passage, a book that is the
01:35:17
Word of God without any substantial loss for thousands of years.
01:35:26
That's why many people should be very careful, and I've heard this many times, that their favorite
01:35:32
Bible verse of all is the story of the woman caught in adultery. Well, that's a great story.
01:35:40
I mean, I love the story. Right, so do I. But to say that it's your favorite Bible verse is...
01:35:46
Yeah, I read an article by a scholar in which he said, my favorite verse not found in the
01:35:52
Bible, and he quoted that verse. By the way,
01:35:59
I want to say this, like I said Sunday, people have no reason to doubt accurate
01:36:05
English versions. There's not going to ever be in history something come up where they're going to say, uh -oh, we found another
01:36:13
Greek version and Jesus says he's not God. There will never be such a thing as that.
01:36:22
And I want to make sure that not only Susan Margaret from Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, who sent in a question
01:36:30
I believe before the break, and our anonymous listener, if you give me via email your full name and mailing address, you have both won a copy of the book that we are discussing by Dr.
01:36:45
Morecraft, How to Read the Bible Biblically, and remember to be patient because the book has not yet been brought back into print by our friends at comprehensivechristianity .com.
01:36:58
That's comprehensivechristianity .com. We're going to go to our final break.
01:37:04
It's going to be much more brief than the last breaks. If you have a question that you'd like to ask, please send it in quickly because we're rapidly running out of time.
01:37:11
It's chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside the
01:37:19
USA. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Dr. Joseph C. Morecraft III. Here's what
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Gary DeMar, president of American Vision, had to say about Iron Sharpens Iron Radio recently.
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Good to be back, Chris. I always enjoy our time. I have to tell you, you're one of the better interviewers out there, and I've been doing this for more than 30 years.
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Wow, that's some compliment. How much do I owe you for that? You don't have to owe me anything.
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We're in good shape. I'm glad you said it on the air so I don't have to brag about myself.
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Tell your friends and loved ones about Iron Sharpens Iron Radio airing live Monday through Friday, 4 to 6 p .m.
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Please visit us at truthloveparent .com. When Iron Sharpens Iron Radio first launched in 2005, the publishers of the
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I'm Dr. Tony Costa, Professor of Apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary.
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I'm thrilled to introduce to you a church where I've been invited to speak and have grown to love,
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It's such a joy to witness and experience fellowship with people of God like the dear saints at Hope Reform Baptist Church in Corham, who have an intensely passionate desire to continue digging deeper and deeper into the unfathomable riches of Christ in his holy word and to enthusiastically proclaim
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This is Pastor Bill Sousa, Grace Church at Franklin, here in the beautiful state of Tennessee.
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Our congregation is one of a growing number of churches who love and support
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Lord Jesus Christ. And of course, the end of which we strive is the glory of God.
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If you live near Franklin, Tennessee, and Franklin is just south of Nashville, maybe 10 minutes, or you are visiting this area, or you have friends and loved ones nearby, we hope you will join us some
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Our website is gracechurchatfranklin .org. That's gracechurchatfranklin .org.
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This is Pastor Bill Sousa wishing you all the richest blessings of our
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Iron Sharpens Iron Radio depends upon the financial support of fine Christian organizations to remain on the air, like the
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Historical Bible Society. The Historical Bible Society maintains a collection of Christian books, manuscripts, and Bibles of historical significance spanning nearly a thousand years.
01:48:01
The mission of HBS is the preservation and public display of ancient scripture, dissemination of scripture, to provide tools equipping believers and Christian apologetics with evidence for the
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Bible's reliability, and to introduce Reformation literature and Christian art to a broader audience.
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Since 2004, HBS has toured schools and churches throughout the Northeast United States, reaching thousands of believers and non -believers alike who are hungry for knowledge of the
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Bible. HBS's founder, Daniel P. Buttafuoco, attorney at law, is committed to sharing this collection, along with an inspirational historical message that will captivate you and your church.
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Come journey through their website, historicalbiblesociety .org. The collection includes a complete 11th century
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Bible, an actual page of the Gutenberg Bible from 1455, the first book ever printed, the
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Geneva Bible, the 1611 King James Bible, and much, much more. Visit historicalbiblesociety .org
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today. Thank you, Daniel P. Buttafuoco, attorney at law, for your faithful support of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.
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And please don't forget, folks, that for a donation of $35 or more to the
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Historical Bible Society, you will receive a 9x12, 44 -page book, gorgeous book that looks like it's printed on parchment paper, that contains the artwork directly off of a first edition
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King James Bible from 1611, the first year it was printed.
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And this is a part of the collection of the Historical Bible Society. When they tour churches, schools, and other organizations, they put that on display.
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But these prints of this beautiful artwork, 17th century artwork, has been taken directly from this first edition, 1611, compiled in 44 pages in a 9x12 -inch book.
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It's yours for your donation of $35 minimum to historicalbiblesociety .org,
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historicalbiblesociety .org, and you can find out at that website how to donate and get your copy, your 44 -page copy of this 9x12, beautiful genealogy of Jesus.
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We are now back with our guest, Dr. Joseph C. Moorcraft III, for our final segment of today's interview.
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And Dr. Moorcraft, I'd like you to have approximately four minutes or so to summarize what you really want etched most in the hearts and minds of our listeners today about this very important topic of how to read your
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Bible biblically. Well, we've been talking about presuppositions. We have to presuppose that the words, as well as the thoughts, are from God and not from man.
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But there's another presupposition that is so vitally important, and maybe next time we can talk about it, and that is we have to presuppose a unity of the
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Bible. We have to presuppose that the Bible is united in both
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Old Testament and New Testament by a common theme and a common structure, and that is what we call the covenant.
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And God's covenant is that bond of friendship that He has established with His people in the
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Lord Jesus Christ. And every book of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is about that particular thing.
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Everything that happens to the people of God in the Old and New Testament happens because they all live within the same framework and the same structure, and that is the covenant of God.
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They share the same promises. They share the same definitions. They share the same laws.
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And everything that happens to the people of God in the Old and New Testament happens because either they believe the promises of the covenant, or they disobey the laws of the covenant.
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They all live within the same structure, and every book of the Bible contributes something to that unifying theme that God has entered into a bond of friendship with His people through the
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Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, there is no great dichotomy between the
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Old Testament and the New Testament, the way most Christians think today. The Old Testament was for another era, for the
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Jewish people. The New Testament's for the church. There is no such split in the Scriptures.
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That there is this structural and thematic unity from Genesis to Revelation, and the great thing about that is that today we, as God's people, live within the same structure.
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That the same covenantal structure, laws and promises that govern what happened to God's people all through the
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Bible still governs our lives to this very day.
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So there's not only a unity to the Scripture, there is a great unity between the
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Scriptures and the Church of God in this century. We can maybe talk about that next time. Well, how do you take the truths that you just unfolded and declared and prevent yourself from falling into the heresy?
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In fact, it's so serious, it's a damnable heresy, and the
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Apostle Paul had some very serious words against it, the heresy known as Judaizing.
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Oh, it is. It's basically legalism that says that you have to earn your way to heaven by faithfully obeying the laws of God.
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That was not only a heresy in the New Testament, that was a heresy in the Old Testament. The Old Testament did not believe and did not teach that we are saved by obeying the law of God.
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The Old Testament taught exactly what's in the New Testament, that is, we're saved by grace through faith in Christ alone, and if that faith is real, it's going to show itself in obedience to God.
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It's interesting that in the fourth chapter of Romans, where Paul gives the two best illustrations he knew of what it meant to be saved by faith in Christ alone, he chose
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Abraham and David, both of whom are Old Testament characters. So legalism was not only condemned in the book of Galatians, legalism was condemned throughout the scriptures.
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It was a religion that was formed largely between the Testaments, and rabbinical
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Judaism of the first century was eaten up with it, and so is the church today.
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We've got to earn salvation, we've got to do enough good things to make enough points of God to like us, where the gospel is exactly the opposite.
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We're saved by grace through faith in Christ alone, apart from the works of the law, and if that faith is real, it's going to show itself in obedience to God and into love, because faith without works is dead.
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Yeah, the rabbinical Judaism is a very, there's a very clear reflection of rabbinical
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Judaism in the Roman Catholic Church, isn't it, because rabbinical Judaism, which actually carries on to this very day, upholds the
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Talmud, the extra -canonical, un -canonical books that were written purely from the thoughts of rabbis, that were not prophets of old, they were not being divinely inspired as the other authors, or as should
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I say, as the authors of the Hebrew Scriptures, and even modern -day
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Judaism, no matter how strict it may be, puts far too much emphasis on these non -canonical teachings, which is the same as the
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Church of Rome. They put so much emphasis on tradition that they wind up teaching as dogma things that are absolute heresy.
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I had a Jewish rabbi tell me, and this is an exact quote, quote, Judaism is not a religion of the
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Torah, it is a religion of the rabbis. Amen. In fact, an
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Israeli who you may have heard of, he's a Reformed Baptist Israeli, born and raised in Israel, spent some time in his youth in the
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United States and then returned to Israel, but Baruch Mo 'oz actually wrote a book called
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Judaism is Not Jewish. Oh, that's good. But going back to that point one more time to further clarify, how do you prevent from importing into the
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New Testament things like the insistence upon circumcision, which was a requirement not for salvation in the old covenant, as many people wrongly believe, but it was essential to be connected with the nation of Israel, and there are those heretics even today, they may be a minority, but there are some messianic groups that are heretical that take that to the extreme of saying that the
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Church needs to do that today. They may say it's not to be saved, but they would say you need to do it to be a
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Christian or to be identified with the people of Yeshua.
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Well, this would be the difference between Reformed Baptists and Reformed Presbyterians. As a
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Reformed Presbyterian, I believe that the sign of the covenant, which in the Old Testament was circumcision.
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I believe Colossians 2 tells us that what circumcision meant in the
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Old Testament is now symbolized in baptism. So we're still commanded to bear the sign of the covenant, but through the centuries the sign changed from circumcision to baptism because there are no sacraments in the
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Christian Church that require the shedding of blood, and there are no sacraments that are limited to one sex over the other.
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The new covenant is bigger and larger than the old covenant, and just like Passover requires the shedding of blood, the
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Lord's Supper, which fulfilled Passover, does not require the of blood. In the
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Old Testament, women could not take the Passover. In the New Testament, we find women taking the sacraments.
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So the sign of the covenant is still commanded of us. We are still required to be baptized, which is the sign of the covenant, but the sign itself has changed.
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And when you study the New Testament, Paul did not go around making professed Christians be circumcised, but he did require them to be baptized as people who believed in the
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Lord Jesus Christ. Well there you have an example of the fact that Chris Arnzen does not only interview people that he agrees 100 % with.
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There you go. Because as Joe knows, I am a Reformed Baptist, so we do disagree on that issue.
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But I want to thank you for doing such a superb job today. I want to remind our listeners that if you want to find out more about Joe Moorcraft's writings, go to comprehensivechristianity .com.
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If you want to find out more about Heritage Presbyterian Church in Cumming, Georgia, where he is the pastor, go to heritagepresbyterianchurch .com.
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I want to thank you so much, Dr. Moorcraft, for being my guest. I want to thank everybody who listened, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater